Why Do I Have to Read This?: Literacy Strategies to Engage Our Most Reluctant Students

by Cris Tovani

Overview

Why do I have to read this?- What teacher doesn't dread this question? It usually comes from our most disengaged students; a student who cries of boredom, or one who is angry or apathetic. When we don't know what else to try, it's easy to become frustrated and give up on these challenging learners. Author Cris Tovani has spent her career figuring out how to entice challenging students back into the process of learning. Why Do I Have to Read This?: Literacy Strategies to Engage our Most Reluctant Students Tovani shares her best secrets, lessons learned from big fails, and her most effective literacy and planning strategies that hook these hard to get learners. You will meet many of Tovani's students inside this book. As she describes some of her favorites, you may even recognize a few of your own. You will laugh at her stories and take comfort in her easily adaptable strategies that help students remove their masks of disengagement. She shows teachers how to plan by anticipating students' needs. Her curriculum you anticipate structures of Topic, Task, Targets, Text, Tend to me, and Time will help you anticipate your curriculum. Inside Why Do I Have to Read This? readers will find: Literacy strategies for all content areas that support and engage a wide range of learners so they can read and write a variety of complex text. Reference charts packed with small bites of instructional shifts that coaches and teachers can use to quickly adjust instruction to re-engage students. Planning strategies that show teachers how to connect day-to-day instruction so that no day lives in isolation. Versatile think sheets that are reproducible and adaptable to different grade levels, content areas, and disciplines. Above all, Tovani gives teachers energy to get back into the classroom and face students who wear masks of disengagement. She reminds us of the importance of connecting students to compelling topics, rich text, useful targets, and worthy tasks. Teachers must tend to students' basic needs and helps us consider how to best structure instructional time. After reading this book, teachers will have new ways to connect with students in a deep, authentic way. Written in a humorous, compassionate, and wise voice, Why Do I Have to Read This? will provide answers to the pressing questions we have when we try to teach and reach all of our students.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781625311511
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/11/2020
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	7.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	10 - 17 Years

About the Author

Cris loves studying the "knowing-doing" gap by investigating how to implement best practice research with 125+ students. Throughout her career, she has tried to take reading and writing research and apply it to all kinds of learning situations. She believes it is important to share with colleagues her successes as well as her failures to highlight how incredibly complex teaching is.

For the past 34 years, Cris has taught grades one through twelve. In addition to being a classroom teacher, she’s had the privileged of working with preservice and secondary teachers. She served several years as an adjust professor at the University of Colorado at Denver and the Denver University.

Cris provides workshops on disciplinary literacy as well as assessment for learning. Her focus is modeling how to integrate literacy strategies into lessons so students can be better readers and writers of disciplinary text. Her favorite days are the ones when she gets to plan with teachers and then work in classrooms with students. Cris strives to “walk the talk” as she models for teachers how to plan for engagement and execute instruction so that students get to read, write, and discuss for more minutes of the class period than their teacher talks.

Cris’ new book is titled, Why Do I Have to Read This? Literacy Strategies to Engage Our Most Reluctant Students. Other books she has written are: I Read it but I Don’t Get It, Do I Really Haveto Teach Reading? So, What do They Really Know? And No More Telling as Teaching: Less Lecture, More Engaged Learning.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments x

Chapter 1 I Hate School and I'm Not Wild About You Either 1

These Kids Don't Care 2

The Masks Kids Wear 2

The Mask of the Class Clown 3

The Mask of Minimal Effort 4

The Mask of Invisibility 6

When Am I Fully Engaged? 8

Circles of Engagement: Behavioral, Emotional, and Cognitive 9

What Comes First? 11

Back to Our Big Questions 11

Chapter 2 Wedgies, Drunken Bears, and the Stress of Shortsighted Planning 15

Trust Them to Think 17

Our Big Questions 22

Planning Ahead to Keep from Getting Behind 27

Winging Workshop 28

Thinking About the Long and Short of It: Long-Term Planning that Guides the Day-to-Day Work 29

Curriculum Is More Than the "Stuff" We Teach 31

CYA Structures: Harnessing the Power of the Six Ts: Topic, Tasks, Targets, Text, Tend to Me, and Time 33

The Six Ts Organized by Small Bites: Topic, Tasks, Targets, Text, Tend to Me, and Time 38

Long-Term Planning Components that Remove the Masks 41

Chapter 3 The Masks of Anger and Apathy 47

The Mask of Anger 47

The Mask of Apathy 48

Teacher as Chief Connector 52

Connecting Kids to Content 61

Connecting Students to Each Other 67

Connections to Text 70

What Works Best to Connect Kids to Text? 71

Where Do I Find Text That Kids Will Read? 73

Connections Affect Anger and Apathy 74

What Works? Five CYA Strategies That Help Students Take Off the Masks of Anger and Apathy 76

Chapter 4 The Mask of the Class Clown 77

Why Text Matters 79

Tending to Text Selection 82

Tending to Topics 87

Who Cares About the Rock Cycle? 88

Rodderick and the Rocks 89

Fifty-Two Stories High 92

What Makes a Topic Compelling? 95

I Don't Want to Get Political 96

Why Controversy Matters 98

The View from the Street 99

What Works? Five CYA Strategies That Help Students Put Away Their Class Clown Mask 106

Chapter 5 The Mask of Minimal Effort 107

If Only I Could Read My Teacher's Mind 110

Showing What Success Looks Like by Analyzing a Model 113

Authentic Artifacts and Mentors: Meet the Guest Teacher 115

Working Smarter, Not Harder, with Learning Targets 119

The Open Letter Learning Target Rubric 121

Minilessons Students Need to Keep Going 125

Real Work: The Need for Audience and Authenticity 127

What Works? Five CYA Strategies That Remove the Masks of Minimal Effort 128

Chapter 6 The Mask of Invisibility 131

Talking Isn't the Only Way to Show Thinking 132

Making the Invisible Visible 133

What They Are and What They Aren't 134

Design Structures That Make Thinksheets Versatile 138

Eight Go-To Structures for Thinksheets 139

Provocative Question Reflections 139

Double-Entry Diaries 143

Inner Voice Sheets 148

Synthesis Thinksheets 153

Exit Tickets 157

Vocabulary Builders 158

Silent Reading Thinksheets 161

Back to the Big Questions 163

What Works? Five CYA Structures That Help Students Remove the Masks of Invisibility 165

Chapter 7 When You Care, You Fall More 167

Teachers Wear Masks, Too 168

A Last Look at Our Big Questions 169

The Six Ts Are Our Tools 173

One Last Story 177

We Determine the Weather 178

Appendices 180

Appendix A Learning Target Rubrics 182

Appendix B Double-Entry Diaries 188

Appendix C Inner Voice Sheets 194

Appendix D Synthesis Sheets 198

Appendix E Vocabulary Builders 203

Appendix F Silent Reading Response Sheet 206

Appendix G Virtual Background Knowledge Placemats 207

References 209